Being attentive to someone, I sense, is not only granting them time; it is recognizing an existence that can oblige me… or transform me, and perhaps that is what I fear.
As I observe myself in this way, I recognize how often my attention is governed by forces foreign to it. It turns away from itself. I feel it scatter. I believe it gives itself to objects that solicit it without nourishing it. And I then understand that the freedom I thought I possessed is only apparent, for where my attention is captured, my being is captured as well. True freedom, I sense, does not consist in multiplying choices, but in being able to decide, in inner silence, what deserves my lingering.
Gradually, attention ceases to appear to me as a tension or a discipline, and takes on the gentler, yet more demanding, face of a form of love. I do not speak of a grasping love, one that seizes and consumes. I speak of an attentive love that lets be and accepts possessing nothing. When I manage, if only for an instant, to attain this quality of presence, the world ceases to be hostile or indifferent to me: it simply becomes available.
Thus I understand that if so many moments of my life dissolve without leaving a trace, it is not that they are poor or insignificant, but that I did not know how to offer them that attention without which nothing inscribes itself durably within me. And it then seems to me that relearning how to be attentive does not amount to improving my life, but to finally joining it, in what is most discreet within it. A fragile life, perhaps, but also a truer one.
They had settled into that uncertain space which belonged neither entirely to the narrative nor entirely to what escaped it. A place of speech, in sum, where one can speak without being heard by those who still believe they hold the pen.
Don Carotte, for Sang Chaud now bore that name with a wholly new assurance, breaks the silence.
Don Carotte (who was Sang Chaud)
Tell me one thing, Anatole. You speak of Igniatius and Lucian as if they were familiar to you. You evoke them with a precision that escapes me. I know that we come from Igniatius, that he made us appear and then displaced us. I also know, through a confused echo, that he entrusts himself to a certain Lucian. But you seem to know more. How do you have access to what stands outside us?
Anatole does not answer at once. He observes the one who has taken his place as one observes a patient who asks the right question without yet measuring its scope.
Anatole
You assume that this knowledge comes from the outside. That is where you are mistaken… slightly. What we know of Igniatius and Lucian was not transmitted to us as information. It was deposited in us as Igniatius spoke to himself. Each time he tried to understand himself, something of that attempt passed through us.
Don Carotte
You mean that we heard them without their speaking aloud?
Anatole
I would rather say that we were the place where their dialogue left traces. Igniatius does not tell us about Lucian. He tells himself through him. And that narrative, even when it believes itself private, produces effects. We are made of them.
Don Carotte slightly furrows his brow. The name he bore until recently seems to weigh differently on his shoulders.
Don Carotte
Then Lucian would not only be the one who listens to Igniatius?
Anatole
No. He is also the one who allows Igniatius to believe himself unified. What concerns us, you and me, is born precisely where that unity falters. When Igniatius speaks to Lucian, he tries to gather what is dispersing. And we are that dispersion. It is therefore not surprising that we know what he is trying to contain.
Don Carotte
And me, in all this? I have taken your name. I occupy the space you left. Am I still myself, or only a displaced form of you?
Anatole sketches a smile that is not reassuring, but attentive.
Anatole
You have not taken my place. You have answered a call left open. When I ceased to be Don Carotte, that name remained available, charged with expectation. You invested it with what you are. That is why you question yourself. The name exposes you to a question you had not yet formulated.
Don Carotte
And you, Anatole, what are you doing now? You surprise me… you speak as Lucian might speak…
Anatole
That is possible. But I treat no one. I only try to understand what passes through us. If I speak to you this way, it is because you occupy an unstable position. You are both the one who follows and the one who leads. This contradiction deserves to be thought.
Don Carotte
And Igniatius, in all this, does he still believe that he writes us… and guides us?
Anatole
He believes it, certainly. That must help him. But he does not believe… he does not want us to continue without him… and without asking permission. As for Lucian, he observes, he interprets, he tries to maintain a distance. What neither of them knows is that their dialogue has made us capable of speaking to one another.
A silence settles, not as a pause, but as an awareness.
Don Carotte
Then we are not… or no longer… merely their creatures.
Anatole
No. We are what remains when they believe they have said everything. And as long as they continue to speak to one another, we will have something to think with.
They fall silent. Not because the conversation was finished, but because it had just found its true place.
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